Bill W:
Chad G:
#4 of 21 in a series: Building SOAPSzone
Story Idea #096 – Going From Zero to 60 in 30 Days (Hopefully)
SOAPSzone began as an idea and very quickly became a website, a newsroom workflow, a pile of investigations, an app project, a forum, a knowledge base, a comedy department and more story ideas than any sensible person would create in the opening stretch of a project.
That speed is the story.
“Zero to 60 in 30 Days (Hopefully)” will document what it looks like to build an independent advocacy and journalism platform with very little money, a small human core and AI used as a set of extraordinarily powerful tools.
The important distinction is that AI is not being handed the steering wheel. Editorial curiosity, priorities, judgment and final decisions remain human. AI expands how much research, organization, drafting, coding and production can happen around that centre.
We will show the messy parts too: workflows that had to be redesigned, documents moved between systems, ideas that multiplied faster than they could be organized, technical dead ends, hosting problems and moments when an apparently small task produced an entirely new branch of the project.
The “30 days” is not a promise that everything will be finished. It is a way of measuring how much infrastructure and publishable work can be created in a short period when modern AI tools are treated more like power tools in a workshop than replacement workers.
The series will include milestones, costs, tools, mistakes and the actual backroom documentation where practical.
If it works, readers will see a publication being assembled almost in real time.
If it does not work, that may be an equally useful case study.
Hence the word “hopefully.”
